by Andrew Smith
Look: There are scars along my back where they put pins in me to heal the vertebrae.
They look like colon, vertical slash, colon. Like this:
I am fine now.
In baseball, I have a good arm and a bat, and I can field, but I am not interested in playing it after high school. My natural talent, I think, is in being fine—no matter what is actually going on inside me.
I am fine.
Nobody ever thinks otherwise.
FIVE EUROS IN DOLLARS
There is no creek in Burnt Mill Creek. I don’t know if there was a creek here at one time, or if the people who named our town were attempting to fool settlers into populating this barren valley at the bottom of San Francisquito Canyon.
False advertising.
There’s no mill here either.
Maybe it burned.
Atoms will be freed, after all, and names are misleading and can constantly change. And people hide themselves in costumes.
That’s what I believe, at least, and so far it has pretty much been the story of my life.
• • •
Cade Hernandez was like a god.
When we were in tenth grade, he orchestrated a plan to standardize our entire class—make every tenth-grader exactly the same. He called it our Quit Being Individuals mission. With only about two hundred kids in our class, it wasn’t a difficult task to manage, and like I said, Cade Hernandez had the ability to make anyone do whatever he wanted.
After all, Cade explained, it was exactly what the school system had been trying to do to us for our entire lives: make us all the same. So at the end of our sophomore year as the week for the State of California Basic Educational Standards Test (they called it the BEST Test) neared and hundreds of number two pencils were being sharpened in preparation for hours of mindless bubble filling by the kids at Burnt Mill Creek High School, Cade Hernandez came up with a wicked idea; one that he got every tenth-grader in our school to play along with too.
Cade’s plan was simple. Even the dumbest kids could follow it.
The plan involved having every one of us give exactly the same pattern of responses on the BEST Test. And we all did it too. When the testing week came around, every single sophomore at Burnt Mill Creek High School bubbled in the following four responses, over and over and over:
C-A-D-E
Naturally, I’d expressed my skepticism over the lack of Bs, but Cade argued that it didn’t matter, since the only people who gave a shit about the BEST Test were bureaucrats and politicians.
“Well, what if they close our school down and fire all the teachers or something?” I’d said.
“Really, Finn? Really? ”
Cade Hernandez could even get me to do whatever he wanted.
And we did not find out until the following year just how effective Cade Hernandez’s Quit Being Individuals mission would actually turn out to be.
• • •
Like most of the boys who played ball for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers, Cade “Win-Win” Hernandez chewed tobacco.
I did not, however.
I think the boys on the team never would have picked up the habit if our coaches didn’t do it so often; if they never spoke the praises of the tradition of chewing tobacco in the dugout, like it was part of becoming a man, part of the game itself.
Our batting coach, a man named John Ritchey, had such rotten gums from his habit of tobacco chewing that he actually lost one of his lower incisors during a practice session. He didn’t care at all. Coach Ritchey spit the entire tooth—root and all—onto the clay of the batting cage at Pioneer Field. The tooth looked like one of those Halloween candy corns that had been boiled in sewage. Most of the boys watched in a kind of hero worship combined with fear and tobacco-buzzed disgust.
Coach Ritchey’s tooth became a sort of religious artifact for the team, like the bones or dried innards from a Catholic saint. Somebody—and I am certain it was Cade Hernandez—must have picked the thing up, because Coach Ritchey’s rotten tooth had a way of showing up in a randomly selected boy’s sanitaries, cap, or athletic supporter before every game we played.
It was such good fun.
• • •
“One of these days, they are going to kick you out of school for all the shit you do, and I will have to walk here, or hitchhike and risk getting picked up by a child molester or some shit,” I said.
“Your dad or stepmom would drive you,” Cade said.
“I don’t want to ride with my parents. What eleventh-grade boy rides with his parents? They treat me like too much of a baby as it is. I’d rather take my chances with the molesters.”
Cade Hernandez drove a two-year-old Toyota pickup. Every day, we left school for lunch but came back for last-period baseball practice. Our season ended that first week in May, not so victoriously for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers.
We’ll get ’em next year.
Cade looked me over and answered, “I think you’re safe as far as perverts are concerned, Finn. Just sayin’. I mean, you’re pretty damn ugly.”
“Yeah.”
Of course he was joking. Cade Hernandez and I looked so much alike that people who didn’t know us often thought we were brothers. We both were tall and bony, and blond headed, too. Cade kept his hair trimmed short, and he had a very sparse golden beard that went from his sideburns and curled almost invisibly just around the lower edge of his jaw. I didn’t have the first nub growing out of my face yet, and my hair was long and unruly.
Cade Hernandez’s parents were immigrants from Argentina. He made up wild stories about being the great-grandson of an escaped Nazi-breeding-camp doctor.
I think the stories were probably true, given the color of Cade’s hair, his blue eyes, and the paleness of his skin. It probably was also a compelling reason behind Cade’s messing with Mr. Nossik in class that morning of the Nazi display.
Cade Hernandez and I had been friends since I was ten years old. That’s a lot of miles traveled together—about six billion. We met in elementary school. Cade Hernandez was my first real friend. His family lived in Burnt Mill Creek, and when I enrolled in grade five, my family, which consisted at that time of my father and pregnant stepmother, had just moved to San Francisquito Canyon.
It wasn’t until the summer before eighth grade that I told Cade Hernandez about the dead horse in the sky. I believe he naturally assumed Tracy, my stepmother, was my actual mother. After all, I called her Mom.
That was the day Cade leaned over toward me, so close our shoulders touched, and he said, “Holy shit, Finn. Your eyes are different colors.”
I said, “They call that heterochromatism.”
“Fucking cool.”
At that time I also said to him, “Not only that, but I am a Jew.”
I remember the day perfectly. We sat in the hot tub beside my backyard swimming pool. It was summer vacation. I had had a particularly bad seizure the day before. I’d pissed myself. Cade didn’t know about it, but sometimes, afterward, I felt like I wanted to die. Sitting there in just a bathing suit, not really thinking about anything, Cade became curious about the emoticon scar along my spine. So I told him my back had been broken when a dead horse fell out of the sky and killed my mother.
I told him about knackeries, and about being a Jew.
Cade answered, “What the hell does that mean?”
“Well,” I said, “my real mother was a Jew. That makes me a Jew.”
“What goes along with being a Jew?” Cade asked me. “Secret handshakes?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a real Jew or anything. I don’t even believe in God to begin with.”
“You’re going to all kinds of hell, Finn,” Cade said.
“No. I’m pretty sure my atoms will just be scattered out there like everyone else’s.”
“That’s scary,” Cade said.
“Well, I just wanted to tell you, in case you decide to hate me for being a Jew,” I said.
I had been wondering a
bout this ever since Cade told me the stories about his Nazi-breeding-camp great-grandfather.
“You’re fucking dumb,” Cade said.
That was how eighth-grade boys told each other everything was okay.
And then Cade Hernandez said, “The tracks left in the snow by a horse with a ridiculously big hard-on.”
I said, “What?”
“That’s what that shit on your back looks like, Finn. If a horse with a really big boner left tracks in snow, ’cause you’re so fucking white. It’s fucking awesome.”
So, on Mr. Nossik’s Nazi Day, we had lunch at Flat Face Pizza. Cade and I ate there at least twice a week because the food was free for us.
Cade Hernandez worked in the kitchen and delivered pizza for Flat Face Pizza. The sign above the business, which was one of the dozen or so boxes of storefronts along Old Mill Boulevard, was an enormous, perfectly round pizza with a grinning face painted on it.
Clever.
It looked like it had been done by a six-year-old.
• • •
Cade Hernandez’s nickname was Win-Win.
He got that nickname at the start of our junior year at Burnt Mill Creek. A senior girl, an exchange student from Germany named Monica Fassbinder, had a peculiar attraction to Cade Hernandez. Monica Fassbinder would pay Cade five dollars every time he’d allow her to give him a hand job at school, in the shed where the night custodian parked his electric golf cart.
Cade Hernandez used the money he earned to buy cans of chewing tobacco, and we joked that Monica Fassbinder’s obsession with giving Cade hand jobs was a win-win proposition as long as they never got caught.
They never did get caught, and that was where the nickname came from.
Cade was always in a good mood.
Cade Hernandez always had plenty of tobacco, too. Win-Win Hernandez earned a steady income of about thirty dollars a week from Monica’s hand jobs.
Monica Fassbinder caused Cade Hernandez to free a lot of his atoms in the night-custodian’s shed.
My father bristles around Cade, avoids him as much as possible. But I think Cade has magical spell-casting beams or something that he can fire from his eyes, because I’d never seen a girl—my stepmother and sister included—who didn’t think Cade Hernandez was endlessly adorable, even if he did things such as openly announce the frequency and stubbornness of his erections.
Some guys have all the luck.
Win. Win.
• • •
When we finished our pizza, Cade asked me, “How much is five euros in dollars?”
“Um.”
I tried to ignore his question. I sucked Coke through a barber-striped plastic straw and stared out the windshield of Cade’s truck.
“I’m serious,” he continued. “Monica gave me five euros today. We did it right before lunch. I just want to make sure she’s not taking advantage of me.”
I nearly choked on my soda.
Nobody would want a girl like Monica Fassbinder to take advantage of poor Cade Hernandez.
“You can’t spend euros at a 7-Eleven,” I countered.
Every day, we’d stop at 7-Eleven before heading back to school for seventh-period baseball. Even though the season was over for us, we still had to show up to practice.
Also, nobody wants a truancy ticket for skipping a class that you don’t have to go to.
“Well duh, Finn. I know that,” Cade said.
“Um. Five euros is a pay raise for you, Cade.”
Cade Hernandez nodded and grinned. “Oh yeah, baby.”
I was simultaneously embarrassed and deeply envious of my friend. I had never even held a girl’s hand before, and suddenly I was a twenty-miles-per-second angry hornet’s nest of hormones, unable to think of anything else except how I might be able to finally orchestrate an opportunity to at least talk to a girl before the earth moved another foot, another inch, through space.
Like that was ever going to happen.
SHIRTS, SKINS, FRISBEES, AND FLOUNDERS
During baseball practice that day, we played Ultimate Frisbee.
Ultimate Frisbee is kind of like football. The baseball team can get pretty rough. It’s all good fun. One time, at the end of our sophomore season, I gave Blake Grunwald a bloody nose playing Ultimate Frisbee.
Blake Grunwald was a grade ahead of me and played backup catcher.
Blake Grunwald still hated me.
It was perhaps a hundred fifty million miles back, in February, I got into a fight with Blake Grunwald. Blake held on to his Ultimate Frisbee nosebleed grudge until he couldn’t stand it any longer. I had never been in a real fight in my life, so it did not go very well.
Blake Grunwald freed some of my atoms.
I never said anything about it to my parents. What could they do? Boys are going to fight, no matter what.
Life goes on.
Twenty miles per second.
So, that day after lunch, Cade and I were on the “skins” team. I usually tried to wear shirts outside because I didn’t like it when people paid any attention to the emoticon scars on my back. It was different with the team, though.
Teams are like that, right?
I do not like emoticons at all. Emoticons are combinations of punctuation marks people frequently use when they don’t really know how to express themselves with real words.
My emoticons are puncture-ation marks from the time a dead horse fell out of the sky onto me and my mother.
What emotion would those things express?
If I had to say what my marks meant, it would be this: Straight-faced guy looks at his reflection in a still pond. He is not at all impressed.
Cade Hernandez said, “What flounders look like when they fuck.”
“Uh. Good one.”
Cade had this game he played. Whenever I had my shirt off, he would make up some random comment about his artistic interpretation for the meaning of the scars on my back. He came up with something new every day. Like Coach Ritchey’s tooth, Cade’s titles for the emoticon marks on my back became a much-anticipated locker-room ritual at Burnt Mill Creek High School.
Cade Hernandez’s impressions most often had something to do with sex.
Today, it was flounders.
“I don’t think flounders fuck,” I said.
“If I was a flounder, I would fuck,” Cade said. “And it would look exactly like that.”
“Uh. Of course it would, Win-Win,” I said.
• • •
Cade Hernandez had seen me blank out on several occasions. One time, it happened in the boys’ locker room at Burnt Mill Creek High School after a baseball game.
Being tired always elevated my chance of having a seizure.
It was the most embarrassing thing, in retrospect. It happened after our game against a team from a place called Moreno Valley.
It goes like this: I am just standing there, and first I smell something sweet—like flowers or maple syrup. Then I realize that I don’t know the names for anything I am looking at. A showerhead can become a pulsating chrome anemone-thing, eating its way through the universe. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Sounds, colors, textures, all mash together in an enormous symphonic assault on my senses as I shrink down, smaller and smaller. I am not hot, cold, dizzy, or uncomfortable—because all of those things are words, which by that point in the seizure have floated away—pfft!—into space.
It is so beautiful.
I believe my atoms begin to drift apart—stop holding hands—in those wordless moments too.
But I see, hear, feel, taste, and smell it all.
So, after our game against Moreno Valley, I blanked out while standing under a flow of steaming water in the boys’ locker-room showers.
Ridiculous.
They told me I was out for over half an hour, more than forty-five thousand miles.
That was as far as Magellan’s voyage around the world.
When the words started to come back into my head and I realized what I was looking at, there were
about a dozen guys around me, staring down. It looked like I was lying inside a clearing in a forest of pale, hairy legs with white Burnt Mill Creek High School locker-room towels flocking their upper branches. I saw fluorescent lights and mottled chrome showerheads above the shoulders of my teammates. I lay on my back, completely naked, on the tiles of the shower floor in a half inch of dirty water while three ambulance attendants with latex-gloved hands strategized methods for lifting me onto a perfectly white rolling gurney stretcher.
One of the paramedics was a woman. She kneeled right there beside my hip and poked an intravenous needle that was attached to a plastic bag of sugar water into my hairless arm as I lay naked on the floor of the shower.
I watched her. She stared at my penis. The atoms that built the highway of nerves in my arms were still disconnected from my brain, so I could not even move my hands to cover myself.
What a ridiculous moment it was!
When the words come back, usually the first thing I feel is anger.
The goddamned words could stay gone. It was always so pleasant, chaotic, emotionless, nameless—everything vibrating so beautifully in the universe without words.
Nobody at all knows this except for me: It is how things really are.
We beat Moreno Valley that day 7–2, by the way.
They were terrible!
DOORS THAT OPEN AND OPEN
My father is a writer.
He is very good at what he does, but he hates the attention it brings.
For a man who wrote novels, sacrificed the hours of his days to the invisible god of word upon word, Dad was never much of a talker. I saw how his shoulders would predictably tense and curl inward like the hood on a cobra whenever anyone got to that point of having talked too much.
Cade Hernandez, who loves to talk, could make my father turn into a cobra.
About seven years, or four billion miles, ago, my father swore he would never let anyone read another word of his writing.
Just like that, he quit.
He had written a science fiction novel called The Lazarus Door, which was wildly popular. The book was about, among other things, a massive religious movement—a reawakening of sorts—that occurred simultaneously with the opening of all these microscopic doors that allowed visitors from space to overrun the earth.